This Sookie. And all the awesome no-food-policing, no-fat-shaming, no-two-dimensional-lack-of-character-development she represented. And the general non-judgey love-of-food that was such a vital part of Gilmore Girls.

(Because it’s Monday warm fuzzies I’m glossing over the big unsexy mega-white-class-privilege that was another vital part of Gilmore Girls, but you know. It’s there.)

And with the simple utterance of “cosplay”, I lose half my readership, but probably gain aaaaaaaaaaall the bumps to my Googleability.

One day, Chaka Cumberbatch started the first big cosplay race war by having the gall to cosplay as Sailor Venus. While being a woman of colour. A badass, damn hot woman of colour (personally, I think the shit would have hit less of the fan if she wasn’t damn hot: much less threatening to the racist geek psyche.)

In referencing that post, I initially wanted to make an addendum to the previous cosplay-related “new rule” about not complaining about the lack of [mandatorily fuckable] women in fandom. But here’s the problem: the dominant geek paradigm is really, really white. And you don’t hear the voices of that paradigm lamenting the lack of people of colour.

It’s dehumanizing both ways: geeks whinge about no [hot] chicks coming to their clubs because they only want to fuck them, but they don’t whinge about no people of colour coming to their clubs because they don’t even want to fuck them.

Kerosene lamps are problematic in three ways: they release pollutants which can contribute to respiratory disease; they pose a fire risk; and, thanks to the ongoing need to buy kerosene fuel, they are expensive to run.

…

Approached by the charity Solar Aid to design a solar-powered LED alternative, London design consultancy Therefore shifted the emphasis away from solar, which requires expensive batteries that degrade over time. The company’s answer is both more simple and more radical: an LED lamp driven by a bag of sand, earth, or stones, pulled toward the Earth by gravity.